“It didn’t just ‘happen’” (Isaiah 53)

It was a journey of some two thousand kilometers—from Jerusalem all the way back to what is modern-day Sudan. The lone traveler had come to worship at the Temple. And I can only imagine that it was for him a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

As his horse plodded along, he occupied his time by reading from a scroll he had no doubt acquired during the course of his stay in Jerusalem—the writings of the prophet Isaiah.

Now you have to realize that in those days no one read silently. Believe it or not, that practice wasn’t to come about for another thousand years. So it was that Philip, a Jesus-follower, who happened to be traveling along the same road, could hear every word that the Ethiopian was reading.

Curious, he asked the traveller, “Do you understand what you’re reading?” To which came the reply, “How can I without someone to explain it to me?” With that he invited Philip to climb up and sit with him in the chariot. And here is what he was reading:

Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter
    and as a lamb before its shearer is silent,
    so he did not open his mouth.
In his humiliation justice was denied him.
    Who can describe his descendants?
For his life was taken away from the earth.

“So who was the prophet talking about?” the traveler asked. “Himself or someone else?” And this was all Philip needed to begin to tell him about Jesus.

The passage, of course, was the remarkable fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, from which we have read this evening. It had been written centuries before, but it gives a vivid description of what was to take place at Calvary, as Jesus, the Lamb of God, hung dying on the cross.

Jesus’ crucifixion and the events that led up to it had come as a terrifying shock to the disciples. Even Peter, for all his bravado beforehand, had crumbled when things began to fall apart. And two days later the disciples could be found cowering in a room with its door locked and barred for fear that what had happened to Jesus might happen to them.

Yet it was not as though Jesus had not warned them about what was going to take place. The gospels record three separate occasions on which Jesus plainly told the disciples that he would be betrayed, rejected by the religious authorities and condemned to death. But they were not able to take in his warnings.

In fact, on the eve of his crucifixion, as the disciples were bickering over which of them was the greatest, Jesus quoted directly from this very passage. “For I tell you,” he said to them, “that this Scripture must be fulfilled in me: ‘And he was numbered with the transgressors.’ For what is written about me has its fulfilment.” (Luke 22:37)

Yet it was only after the resurrection that with Jesus’ help they began to be able to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Luke tells us in his gospel that it was then that Jesus took time with the disciples to open their minds to understand the Scriptures—that all that was written in the Law and the Prophets that would find its fulfilment in him (Luke 24:44-46). And as they began to look through the Scriptures, there it was again and again. Everything began to become clear in a way that it never had been before.

Perhaps you’ve seen this illustration before. At first glance it is a picture of an elderly woman, with a wart on her nose and a kerchief covering her head, looking sadly down, perhaps thinking back to the lost opportunities of the past. But if you look again, you can also see the figure of a young woman, her face turned away from us, perhaps looking ahead to what may await her in the future.

So it was that Jesus enabled the disciples to read the Scriptures in a whole new way. And so it was that on the Day of Pentecost Peter could proclaim to the crowd that had gathered, “Jesus of Nazareth … was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to a cross” (Acts 2:23). And there is no doubt in my mind that one of the passages from the Old Testament that was central in the thoughts of Peter and his fellow disciples was the one we have read this evening.

The events of the cross didn’t just “happen”. They were not a triumph of evil over good, not even for a split second. They were all a part of God’s plan from the beginning of time. And our passage from Isaiah this evening, the passage that the Ethiopian servant was reading on his long homeward journey, opens to us the mind of our gracious and merciful heavenly Father.

The words form the fourth of what are called the “servant songs” of Isaiah. Each one points ahead to the day when God would send his servant, in whom he delights and upon whom his Spirit rests, to bring glory to him and to be a light to the nations. Together they form a progression, reaching their climax in the final song—the passage we have read from this evening.

From the opening verse Isaiah recognizes that God’s plans for us are beyond our understanding. “Who could have believed what we have heard?” he asks. And indeed who would believe that the battered and bloody figure, limp and helpless and hanging from a cross, was the divine Son of God?

Isaiah said he would be despised and rejected. So it was that those who passed by as Jesus hung there laughed at him and mocked him with the taunt, “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” (Matthew 27:39-40)

Yet Isaiah knew that the punishment that the servant would bear was not because of anything he had done, but for you and for me. “He was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities… The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” “He bore the sin of many,” Isaiah tells us, “and makes intercession for the transgressors.” And so it is that we hear Jesus pray, “Father, forgive them…”

It is a dark and gruesome picture. Yet through it all Isaiah also sees a glimmer of light. “The will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand,” he tells us. “Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous…”

And so beyond the gloom of Good Friday we already are given a glimpse of the joy of that first Easter morning—and indeed of the eternal joy of heaven. We have a foreshadowing of that day when all creation will proclaim, “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honour and glory and blessing!” (Revelation 5:12)

When Philip left him and the Ethiopian servant went on to resume his southward journey, he was a changed man. He now knew the suffering servant as his Saviour and Lord. My prayer is that the same may be true for you on this Good Friday—that you may look to the cross of Jesus and find in him the one who was pierced for your sins and who was punished to bring you peace.

“In Accordance with the Scriptures…” (1 Corinthians 15:3-4)

As I look at Jesus in the gospels, I find myself again and again being captivated and challenged the remarkable conversations that he had with all kinds of people. Think of the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, for example, and her fascination over Jesus’ offer of living water. Or how about Jesus’ words with the wealthy young man who came to him earnestly seeking the way to eternal life? Then there was the nighttime exchange with Nicodemus, who only grew more and more confused as Jesus told him of his need to be born from above.

There are at least a couple of conversations, however, that the gospels do not let us in on—conversations that I would very much like to have heard. One of them is the one that took place as the sun was setting on that first Easter Day. It is in Luke’s gospel that we read of the two disciples who were sadly trudging their way home from Jerusalem to Emmaus, a distance of about seven miles. As they walked, a stranger came up and began to walk with them. He asked them what was engaging them in such deep and agitated discussion. When they informed him that it was about Jesus, who had been put to death just days before and about whom there were now rumors that he had been seen alive, he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” “Then,” Luke continues, “beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the Scriptures” (Luke 24:25-27).

Every time I read that passage (and it is one of my favorites in all the Bible) I find myself asking with puzzlement and not a little frustration, “What were those truths that the prophets declared?” “What were ‘the things about himself’ in the Scriptures that Jesus interpreted to them?”

The Cross

The same question crops up when we read this morning’s passage from 1 Corinthians. What we have read this morning are the two earliest written accounts of Jesus’ resurrection. Mark likely composed his gospel around the year 65 AD. But 1 Corinthians comes to us from a decade or more before that, around 55 AD—so within less than a generation of the actual events that the gospels portray. There we read the apostle Paul writing, “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures…”

Most of you will recognize Paul’s words from what we recite Sunday by Sunday in the Nicene Creed: “He suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures.” It is highly probable, that just as we recite the creed (many of us from memory), so Paul too was reciting a formula that was already well known to his fellow believers in Corinth. Aside from the events themselves, what is significant about that statement is the repeated phrase “according to the Scriptures”—that both Jesus’ death on the cross and his resurrection from the grave were all laid out centuries before in the pages of the Old Testament.

We can certainly see that in the case of Jesus’ death. The sublime poetry of Isaiah 53 bears eloquent witness to it. Let me read it to you from a contemporary Jewish translation:

He was despised, shunned by men,
A man of suffering, familiar with disease.
As one who hid his face from us,
He was despised, we held him of no account.
Yet it was our sickness that he was bearing,
Our suffering that he endured.
We accounted him plagued,
Smitten and afflicted by God;
But he was wounded because of our sins,
Crushed because of our iniquities.
He bore the chastisement that made us whole,
And by his bruises we are healed.[1]

Or think also of the plaintive cry of Psalm 22:

My God, my God, why have You abandoned me? …
All who see me mock me, they curl their lips, they shake their heads.
‘Let him commit himself to the Lord; let Him rescue him,
let Him save him, if he is pleased with Him.” …
My life ebbs away: all my bones are disjointed;
my heart is like wax, melting within me;
my vigor dries up like a shard; my tongue cleaves to my palate;
You commit me to the dust of death…
I take the count of all my bones while they look on and gloat.
They divide my clothes among themselves, casting lots for my garments…

We do not have time to examine the whole sacrificial system of ancient Israel or the numerous other passages in the Psalms and the Prophets that portend the cross. No, we have no difficulty in affirming with Paul and the creed that “Christ died … in accordance with the Scriptures”.

The Grave

No, the challenge comes with the second half of the statement, that “he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures”. Where do we find this in the Old Testament? In actual fact, if you look at the Old Testament, its perspective on death is bleak at best. By and large for the writers and singers of the Old Testament death is the end of the road. That message comes through loud and clear in verses such as these:

The dead do not praise the Lord, nor do any that go down into silence. (Psalm 115:17)

In death there is no remembrance of you; in the grave who can give you praise? (Psalm 6:5)

Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the shades rise up to praise you? Is your steadfast love declared in the grave, or your faithfulness in the place of destruction? Are your wonders known in the darkness, or your saving help in the land of forgetfulness? (Psalm 88:10-12)

A living dog is better than a dead lion. The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost. Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in the grave, to which you are going. (Ecclesiastes 9:4,5,10)

You can see from passages like these (and there are plenty more) that by and large the Old Testament’s perspective on death was grim indeed. The best you might hope for after you died was to be fondly remembered by your descendants and perhaps in some sense live on in them. This was the position held by the Sadducees in Jesus’ day. More than once they are described as “those who say there is no resurrection”. And they held that position not because they were agnostics or trying to be radical, but because they believed that were being true to the witness of the Scriptures.

The Resurrection

How then, if this was the case, could Paul and the Corinthians confidently profess that Jesus “was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures”? What did Jesus share as he walked along the road to Emmaus with those two disciples? To find the answer we need to take our Old Testaments once again; and if we read them carefully we will begin to see amidst the gloom and the darkness some tiny pinpricks of light.

Beneath the sadness of the Psalms surrounding death for example, there is a quiet but unflagging confidence that what we see from this side of the grave is not the whole picture, that there is more.

My heart is glad, and my soul rejoices; my body also rests secure. For you do not give me up to the realm of the dead, or let your faithful one see the Pit. You show me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy; in your right hand are pleasures forevermore. (Psalm 16:9-11)

I am continually with you; you hold my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me with honor. Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. (Psalm 73:23-26)

Those few tiny hints, that almost imperceptible adumbration, that we find in the Psalms, begins to become a rising chorus as we move into the prophets. From Isaiah we read,

The Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food… And he will destroy … the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. (Isaiah 25:6-8a)

Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise. O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a radiant dew, and the earth will give birth to those long dead. (Isaiah 26:19)

Then there are these words from Daniel:

Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever. (Daniel 12:2-3)

And perhaps clearest of all from Hosea we read,

Come, let us return to the Lord; for it is he who has torn, and he will heal us; he has struck down, and he will bind us up. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him. Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord; his appearing is as sure as the dawn; he will come to us like the showers, like the spring rains that water the earth. (Hosea 6:1-3)

But to my own thinking, some of the most amazing words were spoken by Job. In the midst of his unutterable suffering we find that beneath all his self-pity there is an unshakeable conviction, which he expresses in those profound and moving words,

I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. (Job 19:25-27)

Although those words came from deep within his heart and he could hear them coming from his mouth, Job still found them almost impossible to believe—too good to be true. “My heart faints within me!” he cried. It seems to me that that was the same reaction of the two disciples in Emmaus. They stared back and forth at each other across the dinner table and said to each other in amazement, “Did not our hearts burn within us while … he opened the Scriptures to us?” It was the reaction of the women who first came to the sepulcher that morning. They ran from the tomb, seized by terror and amazement. The men refused to believe them, accusing them of spreading idle tales. And then there was Thomas, who would not believe until he had put his fingers into where the nails had pierced Jesus’ hands.

Yet what they would discover was that suddenly with Jesus’ resurrection all those tiny points of light sprinkled through the Scriptures had come together to form a single blazing sunrise lighting up the whole sky with its brilliance. In a few moments’ time we will have an opportunity to affirm once again our own faith that Jesus has risen. May it not be for us just a matter of words. Rather, may it be with that same sense of amazement, of overwhelming, as those who first heard the news.

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, this God has prepared for those who love him.” “Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Corinthians 2:9; 15:57).

Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

---

[1]     Tanakh, The Holy Scriptures, The Jewish Publication Society, 1985

“Comfort for God’s People” (Isaiah 40:1-11)

Thomas Cranmer was one of the greatest liturgical geniuses ever to walk the face of the earth. That is why his Book of Common Prayer of 1549 and 1552 continues to be the well from which liturgical scholars and worship leaders draw for wisdom and inspiration—and not just Anglican, but people from all kinds of backgrounds, from Roman Catholic to the emergent church movement. If you take a good look at our 1979 Book of Common Prayer, you will find the words and phrases of Thomas Cranmer popping up again and again.

One element of Cranmer’s Communion service that has disappeared from our contemporary forms of worship is what were called the Comfortable Words. They followed the confession and absolution and went like this:

Hear what comfortable words our Savior Christ saith unto all that truly turn to him:
Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you.
So God loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, to the end that all that believe in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
Hear also what Saint Paul saith.
This is a true saying, and worthy of all men to be received, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.
Hear also what Saint John saith.
If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the propitiation for our sins.

The Comfortable Words were a brilliant addition to the service. Coming immediately after the priest’s absolution, they assured the congregation that the forgiveness they were receiving was not just from the man dressed in robes at the front of the church, but from God himself and testified by his own word in Scripture.

My suspicion is that people in Cranmer’s day took sin and its consequences with considerably greater seriousness than the average Christian in our own. They worried about hell and damnation in a way that most of us simply do not. So it was that they needed these words of comfort—and hearing them every time they presented themselves for Holy Communion meant that they quickly became embedded in their hearts.

The same could be said to be true of the people of Isaiah’s time. They needed good news. They needed encouragement. They needed comfortable words. The previous chapter of Isaiah contains his prophecy to King Hezekiah of the complete destruction of Jerusalem:

Hear the word of the Lord of hosts: Days are coming when all that is in your house, and that which your ancestors have stored up until this day, shall be carried to Babylon; nothing shall be left, says the Lord. Some of your own sons who are born to you shall be taken away; they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon. (Isaiah 39:5-7)

It was a devastating foretelling of Judah’s future. Worse still, in the end it was exactly what happened, not during Hezekiah’s reign, not during Isaiah’s lifetime, but a century later. Jerusalem would fall. Its walls would be left a heap of rubble, its beloved Temple a burned-out ruin; and many of its leading citizens would be carried off into a lonely captivity in Babylon. It is from that period that some of the Old Testament’s most poignant literature arises. Here is an example, from the pen of Jeremiah:

How lonely sits the city
that once was full of people!
How like a widow she has become,
she that was great among the nations!
She that was a princess among the provinces
has become a vassal…

The roads to Zion mourn,
for no one comes to the festivals;
all her gates are desolate,
her priests groan;
her young girls grieve,
and her lot is bitter…

Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?
Look and see
if there is any sorrow like my sorrow,
which was brought upon me,
which the Lord inflicted
on the day of his fierce anger. (Lamentations 1:1,4,12)

The Message of Comfort

So it was that the Lord called Isaiah to speak a message of encouragement—comfortable words—to his downtrodden and disconsolate people. “ ‘Comfort, comfort my people,’ says your God.” The word in Hebrew is nacham. It is exactly the same as we find in the twenty-third psalm: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff—they comfort me” (verse 4). At its root it has to do with breathing deeply or sighing, and so it carries with it the strong sense of sorrow and compassion.  

The instruction is repeated in the second verse: “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem…” Literally translated, the words are, “Speak to the heart of Jerusalem…” Again, we find this expression elsewhere in the Old Testament. It comes to us in the story of Dinah in Genesis. Shechem, one of the local Canaanite princes, found himself smitten by her. The Bible tells us, “And his soul was drawn to Dinah the daughter of Jacob; he loved the girl and spoke tenderly to her,” that is, literally, “He spoke to her heart” (Genesis 34:3). What we have here in Isaiah, then, is the language of romance, the language of love. God’s desire is to woo his people, to draw them from their loneliness and fear, their sorrow and distress, back to himself.

So, as we move farther through the chapter, the cry goes out, “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” Now the day would come when the people of Judah would return to Judah and Jerusalem would be rebuilt. Yet that is not what this prophecy is all about. When they returned to their homeland, it would not be by a straight road. To get from Babylon to Jerusalem required a long, curved route, north and west and south again, hundreds of miles, around the arid desert lands of northern Arabia. No, what this prophecy looked to was not the people returning to their beloved capital, but of God himself returning to his people. And when that happened, there would be no barrier that would stand in his way.

Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all people shall see it together.

The Means of Comfort

God coming to his people: It should not surprise us then that we find Isaiah’s words being taken up at the beginning of each of the four gospels—in the ministry of John the Baptist. From the banks of the Jordan we hear him shout, “… the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’ ” Through his powerful message of repentance and baptism, John challenged people to a renewed relationship with God. Yet John’s primary emphasis was not on the people’s need to come to God (important and essential as that is) but on the stupendous truth that God was coming to them. “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

This is what makes the gospel good news. We can summon people to a greater commitment. We can call them to a deeper life of faith. We can challenge them to fuller obedience. That is all good advice. No doubt about it. But it is not good news. The real good news, the good tidings that ought to echo from the mountaintops, is that God comes to us: that he has done so in the person of his Son, that he continues to do so in the person of the Holy Spirit. This is good news.

The message of comfort that Isaiah proclaimed was not just that God looks down from heaven and says to us, “There, there.” It is that God comes to us to us, that he actually enters our human sphere. And we know that that great vision has been fulfilled in Jesus. He has shared all that it means to be human—in Paul’s words, “He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself, and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:7,8). The Letter to the Hebrews (4:15) adds, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.”

God has come to us not only in Jesus. He comes to us again in the Holy Spirit. So we should not see it as a coincidence that in the New Testament Jesus speaks of the Holy Spirit as “the Comforter” at the Last Supper. “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Comforter, to be with you forever” (John 14:16). “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away the Comforter will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7). “The Comforter, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything” (John 14:26). The Greek word in the New Testament is the exact equivalent of the Hebrew that we find in Isaiah.

It is the Holy Spirit who comes into in our lives who mediates the love of the Father and the Son, who makes them realities for us.

The Ministry of Comfort

As we come to the third section of this morning’s passage, we find that Isaiah was given good news to announce to Jerusalem not only to bring them comfort, but also so that they could in turn pass it on to the whole of the nation. So too, God has come to us in Jesus, he has given us his Holy Spirit, not just so that we might have an unshakeable hope within us, but even more so that we might bring comfort and encouragement to others. This is what Paul was seeking to get across to the Christians in Corinth when he wrote to them in these words:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. (2 Corinthians 1:3,4)

Again and again in the course of my own Christian life, it has been those seemingly most in need of comfort who have ministered most deeply to me: a man in his thirties diagnosed with terminal leukemia, an Inter-Varsity staff worker who suffered from chronic depression, a woman confined to bed for years with back pain, and the list could go on and on.

I know that there are many in the congregation this morning who need comfort, who have endured pain, bereavement, unemployment, sickness, loneliness and depression. May Isaiah’s words speak to you this morning. May you know that Jesus, the Man of Sorrows, has shared in your suffering. May you also know the healing presence of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, on a daily basis in your life. At the same time, especially as we celebrate this Advent season and as we celebrate Jesus’ coming to us, may we never keep that comfort to ourselves, but allow the Holy Spirit use even our weakness to bring comfort and encouragement to others.